Project Management Multitasking

Neville Turbit - Project Perfect

Overview

The
term "multitasking" has been used to describe the act of focusing
on many things at once. It is almost a survival technique to cope
with the flood of information coming our way. Life is becoming more
complex with many more things needing our attention.

Project Management is no different. In fact the Project Manager
can be considered the master of multitasking. Everyone wants a piece
of your time, and there are a multitude of things to keep track
of.

Evolution of Multitasking

In March 2008 Time Magazine ran a cover story entitled "The Multitasking
Generation". The comments below from that article summarise the
speed with which multitasking is evolving.

"Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several
things at once. Mothers have done it since the hunter-gatherer
era--picking berries while suckling an infant, stirring the pot
with one eye on the toddler. Nor is electronic multitasking entirely
new: we've been driving while listening to car radios since they
became popular in the 1930s. But there is no doubt that the phenomenon
has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers,
when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch
American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season's finalists
all at once."

Can we Multitask Efficiently

The Time article also covers our brain's ability to multitask:

"Although many aspects of the networked life remain scientifically
uncharted, there's substantial literature on how the brain handles
multitasking. And basically, it doesn't. It may seem that a teenage
girl is writing an instant message, burning a CD and telling her
mother that she's doing homework--all at the same time--but what's
really going on is a rapid toggling among tasks rather than simultaneous
processing. "You're doing more than one thing, but you're ordering
them and deciding which one to do at any one time," explains
neuroscientist Grafman."

"The switching of attention from one task to another, the toggling
action, occurs in a region right behind the forehead called Brodmann's
Area 10 in the brain's anterior prefrontal cortex, according to
a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study by Grafman's
team. Brodmann's Area 10 is part of the frontal lobes, which "are
important for maintaining long-term goals and achieving them," Grafman
explains. "The most anterior part allows you to leave something
when it's incomplete and return to the same place and continue from
there." This gives us a "form of multitasking," he
says, though it's actually sequential processing.

Because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last regions of the
brain to mature and one of the first to decline with aging, young
children do not multitask well, and neither do most adults over
60. New fMRI studies at Toronto's Rotman Research Institute suggest
that as we get older, we have more trouble "turning down background
thoughts when turning to a new task," says Rotman senior scientist
and assistant director Cheryl Grady. "Younger adults are better
at tuning out stuff when they want to," says Grady. "I'm
in my 50s, and I know that I can't work and listen to music with
lyrics; it was easier when I was younger.

But the ability to multiprocess has its limits, even among young
adults. When people try to perform two or more related tasks either
at the same time or alternating rapidly between them, errors go
way up, and it takes far longer--often double the time or more--to
get the jobs done than if they were done sequentially, says David
E. Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory
at the University of Michigan: "The toll in terms of slowdown
is extremely large--amazingly so."

Meyer frequently tests Gen M students in his lab, and he sees
no exception for them, despite their "mystique" as master
multitaskers. "The bottom line is that you can't simultaneously
be thinking about your tax return and reading an essay, just as
you can't talk to yourself about two things at once," he says. "If
a teenager is trying to have a conversation on an e-mail chat
line while doing algebra, she'll suffer a decrease in efficiency,
compared to if she just thought about algebra until she was done.
People may think otherwise, but it's a myth. With such complicated
tasks [you] will never, ever be able to overcome the inherent
limitations in the brain for processing information during multitasking.
It just can't be, any more than the best of all humans will ever
be able to run a one-minute mile."

Multitasking in Projects

While the article in Time is fascinating about general life, how
does this impact projects? Some might see Project Managers as essential
at multitasking yet the research tells us this is not an efficient
way to work. Better to focus on one thing and get it done rather
than ten things and take twenty times as long.

It also spills over into how work is allocated. Should you give
someone one or two tasks to complete, or ten tasks to complete?
The research points to one or two. If you do have to give them ten,
also give them a priority so they work consistently on one at a
time with minimum switching between tasks.

Short Term Focus in Projects

Recently I read of a guy who walked to the South Pole dragging
a 120 kg sled. He said what kept him going was not focusing on reaching
the pole. He focused on "only one hour before I get a break" or "I
just want to reach the base of that hill". Focus on small goals
and the big goal will arrive before you know it.

The whole team should be focused on achieving short term goals
which minimise multitasking. For example, rather than focus on spending
three months to produce a business case, focus on putting together
the costs, putting together the benefits, doing a risk analysis,
doing a resource plan. Focus people on the smaller goals. Set milestones
for smaller steps.

In your personal role as Project Manager, try to organise your
time so that you devote blocks of time to each task. Avoid as much
as possible trying to work on too many things at once. If you have
eight things to do in a day try to block out half an hour for each
(or however long each might take). Don't do a bit on something,
drop it, do something else then pick up the first thing again.

Long Term Focus in Projects

It may seem contradictory at first but the Project Manager also
needs to have a long term focus. They are the project "visionaries" and
need to see what is down the road. The trick is not to get bogged
down in the detail of what is down the road unless there is a very
good reason to do so.

To give an example, suppose you know that in two months you will
need to go through an approval process. It might be internal or
external. Perhaps it is with a government regulatory agency. You
have done it a thousand times before and this project should be
no different. Unless you have lots of time on your hands, park that
task until you are closer. Keep your focus on the work you have
to do this week and next. Don't sacrifice your attention on something
that can just as easily wait a few weeks if it will detract from
the immediate.

On the other hand, if you have never had to seek approval, work
out what are the big questions I have to answer? Get the answers
and leave the details until closer to the date.

An Example using Email

I picked up this idea some months ago and it has certainly helped
me with email. I had to modify the original idea a bit but here
is how I deal with email. Previously, I tended to read email, park
them if something needed to be done, come back to them, and generally
have an overfilled inbox. Now I have a number of folders which I
numbered so they sort in the order I want.

Do

Defer

Delegate

Read

Archive

When I go to my inbox, I sort the emails immediately into one of
the five categories. In fact the "5. Archive" folder has a number
of subfolders where I store emails by topic or sender.

Once the inbox is distributed to the five folders, I go to "1.
Do" and do whatever needs to be done to the immediately actionable
emails. I go to the "3. Delegate" box and send the emails to whoever
is being assigned to cover the emails. I also check on other delegated
emails to see if any are overdue.

When times permits, I look at "2. Defer" and work on my top priority
emails in that box. It is surprising how many last a few weeks in
this folder and then get deleted. They are no longer relevant. Finally
I spend about an hour a day in the "4. Read" folder reading information
that may be newsletters or emails with some technical information.

The key thing is that I am not multitasking. I devote a chunk of
time to address particular actions be they doing things, reading
things, delegating things or checking the backlog of deferred actions.
It makes me much more efficient, and ensures the most important
tasks get addressed first.

Summary

We are asked to digest more inputs every day. In ten or twenty
or fifty years we will probably look back on the "good old days" in
2009 when we only had ten things to do at once. A Project Manager
needs to manage their team so that they limit multitasking. This
can best be done by reducing the flood of work that can be assigned
to an individual. Give them clear tasks with priorities and deadlines.

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